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Tuesday, 2 April 2013

From Remington House, Zürich, Switzerland, to DP One Café, Greymouth, New Zealand

Imagine my surprise today to walk into the DP One Café
at 104 Mawhera Quay beside the wharf in Greymouth to find a Remington
Standard typewriter (Model 11) tucked into the back of a bookshelf.

An even greater surprise was in
store for me. It was one thing to find an old Remington (circa 1908) in such a town
and in such a place. It was altogether another to realise that this Remington
had, remarkably, made its way to Greymouth, New Zealand, all the way from Remington
House, Bahnhofstrasse 46, Zürich, Switzerland.

Quite how it came to be in
Greymouth we shall never know.

The DP One Café on Mawhera Quay in Greymouth

Mawhera Quay when the Remington 11 was made

For some strange reason, I’ve
long felt a kind of affinity with Georg Sommeregger, so naturally I was doubly delighted
to see the dealer badge “Anton Waltisbühl & Co, Remington House, Zürich”.

I should have been far less
surprised to find that Georg knows all about Anton Waltisbühl, and even has an 1896
image of Waltisbühl (above) along with a story on one of his web pages, at typewriter.ch

Georg’s primary interest in Waltisbühl
is, as he explains, because Waltisbühl imported the first typewriter into
Switzerland, in 1885. Waltisbühl was born in Bremgarten on July 3,1855, and died
in Morcote on November 15,1940. He began his career as a notary in Bremgarten
in Aargau. In later life he founded the World Language Association in Zürich.

Web pages relating to “Remington Standard Typewriters - No 10 and Beyond”, put together
by Will Davis and the late Tilman Elster, state of the Remington No 11: “As
with previous models of Remington, numbers higher than the base machine's model
(at the time) indicated an advance in option and in price. In the case of
the No 11 Remington, a decimal tabulator was fitted with 10 different stop
positions.”

I thought of Georg again, later
the same day, when I visited the hamlet of Kumara, 14 miles south of Greymouth.
Once a city, at the height of the West Coast goldrush, Kumara is now near to
being a ghost town. But stories of its golden days are being kept alive, and
are told in boards posted along the main street.

One such related to an
outspoken and successful hotelier, Jean Siegfried Spindeler, who was born in
Switzerland in 1843. He died in Kumara on August 3, 1921.

Spindeler's Crown Hotel, right, stood on the corner of streets once packed with pubs and business houses. None now still exist. Below, Spindeler outside his hotel:

Kumara’s first mayor, by the
way, was New Zealand’s “King Dick”, Lancashire-born Sir Richard John Seddon. It
was under Seddon’s long premiership of the new nation that New Zealand introduced to the world such
enlightened things as a social welfare system which included old age pensions, and
women’s suffrage.

"King Dick" Seddon of Kumara

Switzerland was also on my mind
when I sought out the place where in March 1966 I bought my first typewriter, an Olivetti
Lettera 32 portable, at Jim McNulty’s Typewriter Shop on Albert Street in
Greymouth. McNulty’s shop is now a Vinnie’s store, so of course I thought of
Adwoa Bagalini and Richard Polt declaring St Vincent de Paul “the patron saint
of typewriters”. With that in mind, it just seemed so right to me that in place of the long-gone McNulty's was a Vinnie's.

Apart from the old Remington in
the DP One Café, and my own Groma Kolibri, I saw no other typewriters in
Greymouth. My heart skipped a beat, however, when I passed under this shop
sign:

Kia Ora!

Tapping gingerly. Sunday morning, coming down.
Might be my third or fourth attempt to establish a blog. Steeled to make it work this time. All about typewriters. Typewriters in Australia. Ergo, "oz.Typewriter", something a bit different. Please enjoy.